By Nate Carlisle
The Salt Lake Tribune
Copyright 2007 The Salt Lake Tribune
All Rights Reserved
SALT LAKE CITY — Soon after the Trolley Square shooting, Merrily Cope, the director of community treatment at Valley Mental Health, took a phone call from someone wanting to talk.
The person wasn’t a shooting victim. Or a relative of a victim. Or one of the dozens of Trolley shoppers and patrons who witnessed the carnage or ran for their lives.
It was one of the emergency personnel.
Despite their experience and training, police and firefighters are among the hundreds of people at risk for mental or emotional hardship as a result of the violence at Trolley Square, according to mental health workers.
“What they’re feeling is a pretty normal experience for everyone,” said Cope.
Some emergency personnel saw firsthand the carnage caused by gunman Sulejman Talovic, who shot nine people, killing five, on Feb. 12.
Other responders assisted the traumatized people who narrowly escaped being shot. And they comforted panicked and grieving family members.
“You can’t work an incident like that and not be touched by it,” said Jay Rhodes, a chaplain for the Salt Lake City Police Department. “Sometimes we get the idea that cops are supposed to be these stoic machines, and we’re not. We’re human beings.”
And those humans have been known to suffer after a catastrophe, said Arshad Husain, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia and director of its International Center for Psychosocial Trauma.
When Husain and a team of psychology experts traveled to Baton Rouge, La., after Hurricane Katrina, he recalled, they found more emotional problems in the tents for the Red Cross workers than in tents full of evacuees.
“Everyone was involved in addressing the needs of the evacuees but neglecting the rescue workers,” Husain said.
Problems can grow if they are left untreated. Two years after the Oklahoma City bombing, alcohol use among firefighters in that town doubled, Husain said.
Police and firefighters in Salt Lake City pointed out they are screened before hiring to ensure they will be able to tolerate the job stress. Also, they grow accustomed to witnessing human suffering.
“These are the busiest units in the state. It’s not like they haven’t seen death and dying before,” said fire Battalion Chief Paul Hewitt. But he also conceded the massacre at Trolley Square was one of the worst crimes ever committed in the state.
Hewitt was in charge of the fire department’s response to Trolley Square. Along with triaging victims and helping police officers lead people to safety, the fire department did something else that night - something Hewitt said he’s never seen before.
On 500 South, across from Trolley Square, the fire department set up a tent with a mental health worker inside. The counselor talked with firefighters as they left the scene and reminded them of the signs of stress. Additional counselors were sent to Fire Station 1, from which most of the firefighters were dispatched.
At the police department, peer counselors held two debriefings for the officers who responded to Trolley Square. In those meetings, officers talked with each other about the scene and what each of their jobs were there. It was a way of helping people process their thoughts, said Shawn Josephson, the peer counseling coordinator.
It was the same sort of debriefing the police department held three days earlier, on Feb. 9, after a car crash killed three members of the Williams family.
Josephson declined to discuss what officers said in the Trolley Square debriefings, but he noted the shootings posed some unique issues for police. The emergency was so large, and so many cops responded, that a sizable pool of officers could be impacted. Also, the apparent randomness of Talovic’s targets left police officers seeing themselves and their loved ones vulnerable to such a crime.
“This could be anybody,” Josephson said of the victims. “Everybody goes out to eat once in a while. Everyone goes somewhere to do their shopping.”
Also weighing on officers are questions about their ability to solve problems and prevent death. “Even when we did our best job, people weren’t saved,” he said.
Husain said rescue workers can feel guilty about not being able to help more victims. The responders need to be told they cannot be everything to everybody and must stay within resources, Husain said.
Hewitt said he’s not worried about long-term consequences for firefighters, saying counseling is always available to them. Firefighters, by their nature, do a good job of talking to one another about problems, Hewitt said.
Since the shootings, there’s been informal talk among rank-and-file cops to watch out for each other emotionally, Josephson said, and he doesn’t believe the Trolley Square massacre will cause officers to suffer more acute emotional problems than other traumatic events they have witnessed.
But the sheer number of police affected could pose some long-term concerns for the department, he said.
“It affected our whole department, one way or the other.”
Stress after disaster
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that responders at natural or man-made disasters may experience stress during or after the event. According to the CDC, these are some symptoms:
- PHYSICAL: Chest pain, difficulty breathing, shock symptoms, fatigue, nausea/vomiting
- COGNITIVE: Confusion, nightmares, heightened or lowered alertness, poor concentration
- EMOTIONAL: Anxiety, guilt, denial, irritability, loss of emotional control, depression, sense of failure, blaming others or self
- BEHAVIORAL: Intense anger, withdrawal, emotional outburst, temporary loss of or increase in appetite, excessive alcohol consumption, inability to rest and/or pacing, change in sexual functioning